Two CU-Boulder professors named 2013 Leopold Leadership Fellows

Two University of Colorado Boulder environmental researchers have been named Leopold Leadership Fellows for 2013 in recognition of their outstanding leadership abilities and desire to communicate scientific issues beyond academic audiences.

Environmental design Professor Kevin J. Krizek and environmental studies Assistant Professor Maxwell Boykoff are among 20 Leopold fellows selected this year from around the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Krizek researches sustainable transport infrastructure, bicycle planning, transportation policies and land use. He also serves as outreach and education coordinator for sustainability and as senior transportation fellow for the CU Environmental Center.

One of Krizek’s recent papers examined the role of bike facilities in influencing people’s preferences for traveling around town. He found that people prefer bike facilities, such as designated lanes, more than the absence of street-side parking on roads, and that people will go up to two miles out of their way to get to a bike path.

Boykoff researches cultural politics of climate change and analyses of the transformations of carbon-based economies and societies. He also is a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, and an adjunct faculty member in the geography department.

One of Boykoff’s areas of focus is the mass media -- a key vehicle by which climate change contrarianism has traveled, he says. Among his various and ongoing research projects, Boykoff has tracked climate change coverage in 50 newspapers in 20 countries on six continents since 2004.

The Leopold fellowships provide scientists with intensive communications and leadership training to help them communicate scientific information effectively to nonscientific audiences, especially policymakers, the media, business leaders and the public.

The program, launched in 1998, is named for Aldo Leopold, a renowned environmental scientist who communicated his scientific knowledge simply and eloquently. His writings, including his 1949 book, “A Sand County Almanac,” are credited with infusing the emerging conservation movement with good science and a stewardship ethic.

The two previous Leopold fellows from CU-Boulder were Sharon Collinge in 2004 and Alan Townsend in 2001. Collinge is the CU-Boulder director and a professor of environmental studies. She also is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and chairs CU-Boulder’s Environment and Sustainability Visioning Committee. Townsend is a CU-Boulder professor of ecology and evolutionary biology as well as environmental studies, currently on leave to serve as director of the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation.